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Taha Yasseri and Mark Graham (Oxford), Anselm Spoerri (Rutgers), and Janos Kertesz (BME): The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis. Leigh Ellen Gray (Charleston): Thumb War: The Facebook “Like” Button and Free Speech in the Era of Social Networking. Kurt Eichenwald pieces together the largely unnoticed shift in Facebook strategy: new content, new algorithms, and new alliances, combined to power a marketing model that could have the rest of the world scrambling to catch up. The great Facebook exodus has begun. Bringing back the Internet portal: Yahoo’s mission creep is a useful case study in why web companies like Google and Facebook continue to grow their functionality and why startups keep selling to the seemingly bloated leviathans. This ambitious nonprofit wants to fact check the web.

A new issue of Five Dials is out. Patrick E. Murray (UCLA): Friends with Benefits: A Guide to Detecting Corruption in Politics After Citizen's United. When does plastic surgery become racial transformation? Leo Jiang grew up in an English industrial town, emotionally scarred by bullies who taunted him about being Chinese — a few years and tens of thousands of dollars later, he’s not really Chinese anymore. The Equator once marked the edge of the civilised world; if we put it at the centre, we might see our place in the heavens. Super sleuth: Colleen Fitzpatrick solves historical mysteries, deciphering centuries-old records and spelunking through the past, near and distant, like a time-traveling gumshoe. Where Thomas Nagel went wrong: The philosopher's critique of evolution wasn't shocking — so why have his colleagues raked him over the coals?

From LARB, John B. Thompson reviewsAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt and What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China by Tobie Meyer-Fong; and Nick Holdstock interviews Lisa Ross, author of Living Shrines of Uyghur China. How do Chinese intellectuals construe social instability? Deng Yuwen on how to understand China's foreign policy: China can become a beacon for the world — if it trades in its conservative foreign policy for one that emphasizes universal values. On criticizing China: James Fallows on a unified field theory on assessing goods and bads. Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng on China and the night-watchman state’s last shift. Benjamin F. Carlson on China's France fetish: The new rich want wine, cheese, and savoir vivre — underemployed Frenchmen are glad to deliver it.

A new issue of the Journal of Conflictology is out. Nicolas Salamanca (Maastricht) and Daniel S. Hamermesh (Texas): Endophilia or Exophobia: Beyond Discrimination. Jonathan Chait on how Yuval Levin has harnessed himself, at least rhetorically, to a series of falsifiable claims; they are being falsified, but the restraints of his ideology give him no room to do anything but obfuscate. UN reinscribes Polynesia on list of non self-governing territories, France calls it "blatant interference". From Fathom, an interview with Michael Walzer on excavating the Jewish political tradition; and an interview with Richard Perle on George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the Arab Spring. Jean-Clement Martin on the multiple meanings of revolution: Upheaval, crisis and imponderables. Death of the Salesmen: Derek Thompson on technology's threat to retail jobs — should we mourn them?

From Edge, Lee Smolin on thinking about nature and how to make a theory of the universe as a whole system. James Gleick reviewsTime Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin. Lisa Randall’s Guide to the Galaxy: The famed cosmologist unveils her latest theories on the invisible universe, extra dimensions and human consciousness. Dark matter is the commonest, most elusive stuff there is — can we grasp this great unsolved problem in physics? Big news from the annals of science last week: A British newspaper reports that the mysteries of the universe may have been solved by a hedge-fund economist who left academia 20 years ago. Jon F. Wilkins on Eric Weinstein and an outsider’s Theory of Everything. Philosophy isn't dead yet: Far from having replaced metaphysics, fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help — Einstein saw it coming.